And, by giving away David Rock’s Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter all Day Long, she hopes to put a book in your hands that will help you work smarter and find a better work/life balance so you don’t have to make Olympian sacrifices to succeed.
One week from tonight will be the sixth PechaKucha Night in Milwaukee, and it’s going to be pretty special.
Tuesday, February 23
8PM
Sugar Maple
441 E. Lincoln Ave in Bay View
PechaKucha Night was started in Tokyo as a non-profit. For the Milwaukee franchise, we donate all the event money above costs to the foundation to help support the global websites and enable the foundation to do greater things (which can be found here).
For our sixth event in Milwaukee, we’re waiving the cost of admission to make it easier for more people to attend as the local economy continues to get back on its feet. We’re also giving the first 20 people through the door a copy of Andy Nulman’s book “Pow!” which talks about taking your idea from “who cares?” to “wow!”
The 20 (image) x20 (seconds) presentations will include topics such as, the global impact of coffee, green homes, November beards, why people don’t like to dance (and what to do about it), songs and sausage, the fact that humans actually have three brains, and much more.
Presenters include:
Mike Brenner – art snob turned beer snob (and one that cares deeply about our city)
James Carlson – builder of human brains
Jim Chambers – architect for a greener world
Fred Gillich – designer and bringer of “too much metal”
Steve Hawthorne – loves coffee so much that he travels to S. America to get it
Ryan Matteson – music lover and blogger
David Ravel – Milwaukee’s culture czar
Winston Smith – from London!
Betty Blexrud-Strigens – rocks the stage and darkroom
Jim Warchol – designer and beard aficionado
And if that’s not all, Shopkeeper Ken will be spinning records before, during the beer break, and after the event. It’s going to be quite a night. Hope to see you there.
In 1999, Jason Fried was one of the founders of 37signals – then a web design firm, and now a software development company. That transition occurred when the small company found challenges in keeping track of all the project components and information. They developed an in-house software program to help keep things organized, and it worked. So well, in fact, that building those types of products became the company’s focus, and the rest is history.
I did a brief Q&A with Jason in advance of the book, posted below. Even these few answers reflect the type of clarity, purpose, and down-to-earth approach that the book reveals in greater detail. Check it out, pre-order the book for your whole team, and watch what happens. It’s going to be a great year.
What are some of the ways that “big” can work against a company and their ideas?
Big means too many layers. Big means an idea never happens because it needs to be approved by the whole chain of command. Big means a customer request goes to support but never gets heard by the people who actually make the product. Big means everything gets filtered by committees and lawyers so you wind up sounding like a robot instead of a human. Big means lots of documentation and planning (i.e. guessing) instead of reacting just in time.
Most importantly, big makes it hard to change. Look at the physical world. The more massive an object, the more energy is required to change its direction. It’s a lot easier to turn around a speedboat than an aircraft carrier.
How is spam more than just an email issue?
Spam is a way of thinking. It’s an impersonal, imprecise, inexact approach. You’re merely throwing something against the wall to see if it sticks. You’re harassing thousands of people hoping that a couple will respond.
Press releases are spam. Each one is a generic pitch for coverage sent out to hundreds of journalists you don’t know hoping that one will write about you.
Resumés are spam when someone shotguns out hundreds at a time to potential employers. They don’t care about landing your job, they just care about landing any job.
Spam is basically a half-ass way of getting someone’s attention. It’s insulting, really.
A much better route: Be personal. Call someone. Or write a note. If you read a story about a similar company or product, contact the journalist who wrote it and pitch them with some passion. If you want a job, write an amazing cover letter that explains why you’d love to work there.
Don’t rely on the shotgun approach of spam though. If you invest nothing in your interactions, you probably won’t get much back.
If companies don’t have meetings, how can they make sure to have everyone understand what the goals, ideas, and project details are?
This is assuming meetings are the only way you can communicate. If so, you need to rethink the way you do business.
We’re based in Chicago but we have employees in Idaho, Canada, Spain, England, and other places too. We stay on the same page by using passive communication tools, like Campfire or Basecamp. These tools and things like email don’t require an instant reply. They don’t require everyone to drop what they’re doing and run to the conference room. They let people respond when it’s convenient for them.
That said, an occasional meeting or phone call can be helpful. The problem comes when you rely on them for everything. Then you’re just wasting the day.
How and when does productivity best happen?
When there are no interruptions. Interruptions are the enemy of productivity. The modern workplace has become an interruption factory. A meeting here, a conference call there. Before you know it you don’t have a work day anymore, you have a series of fragmented work moments.
Great work requires long stretches of uninterrupted time. That’s why many people get their best work done early in the morning, late at night, or on the weekends. It’s the only time they aren’t interrupted.
Culture might not be something that can be created, but can it be changed?
Absolutely. Culture is the by-product of consistent behavior. Change your behavior and you change your culture. Directives, announcements, declarations, missions statements – that’s all crap. SAYING something doesn’t change culture. The only thing that changes culture are repeated, consistent actions.
➻ Seth Godin and Steven Pressfield in the same room? Yep, and Portfolio’s Courtney Young was there taking notes. My favorite line comes from Seth: “The only thing all successful people have in common is that they’re successful, so don’t waste your time copying ‘the successful strategies’ of others.”
➻ Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, chatted with Dutch journalist Dirk Koppes about the future of books, and posted the interview yesterday. His conclusion is that “There’s no need to panic, just focus on doing great work and getting it to people in great ways.” I couldn’t agree more.
But Nicholas Ciarelli at the Daily Beast might not. He thinks the book industry is making the same mistakes that record labels made, writing “the choice isn’t between buying an e-book or a physical book, but rather between buying an e-book or no book at all.” Read his argument in The Great E-book War.
➻ David Shields talked with Sonya Chung of The Millions about his new book, Reality Hunger, in a two part interview. (Hat tip to Vroman’s Bookstore.) He said something rather brilliant in part two of the interview: “Art is a conversation between and among artists; it’s not a patent office. Reality can’t be copyrighted.”
The interview also led me to an interesting interview with a book pirate done by C. Max Magee, Confessions of a Book Pirate.
➻ Awesomely Simple author John Spence believes that Leaders are Readers, so he reveals his crush on Joe Calloway and discusses some of his favorite business books.
➻ From the realm of the slightly absurd, Joe Posnanski, author of The Machine, thinks “the Yellow Brick Road is the most wasteful and pointless public works projects ever,” and Douglas Adams ponders Puddle Thinking at butdoesitfloat.com.
➻ Publishers Weekly posted a Valentine’s Day Roundup of book reviews today, and Powell’s has a special offer for the special holiday.
➻ And, because I love you, here’s James Blackshaw. His latest album, The Glass Bead Game, takes its name from my favorite Hermann Hesse novel.
“Lay hold of today’s task and you will not depend so much upon tomorrow’s”
Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Broadway Business, 320 pages, $26.00, Hardcover, February 2010, ISBN 9780385528757
Chip and Dan Heath, brothers and scholars, won the inaugural 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year Award with their first book, Made to Stick. That book, despite being a newborn, also made our list of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. When the publisher sent me the advance copy of Switch, I was concerned about the “sophomore slump” that happens in sports and music, whether due to a true drop in quality or critical backlash due to expectations. Still, I dropped everything and stretched out on my couch to read, and I can tell you that Switch might even be better than Made to Stick.
In Made to Stick, the Heaths offered a methodology for how to make your ideas memorable. And, of course, one of the things the Heath brothers excel in is creating their own sticky ideas. They use clever acronyms, catchy phrases, and unusual connections that we can easily remember and reference for future situations. In Made to Stick, it was SUCCESs, and the “curse of knowledge” among other memorable lessons. Switch is about making change happen, despite our tendency to fight it. Here the Heaths teach us about the Rider—or rational mind—and the Elephant—our emotional mind— and how change needs a partnership between the two in order to “shape the path” ahead. We also learn about TBU—true but useless—which, undiagnosed, can lead to decision paralysis.
To explain an antidote to decision paralysis, the Heaths tell of a small community in South Dakota that had been losing young people at an unsustainable rate. A group of high school students decided to do something. In the past, decision paralysis ruled efforts like this because the problem was so overwhelming and the potential answers so numerous. The students commissioned a survey and discovered that half the residents shopped outside they county. The first step was to ask the residents to support local businesses, which in turn became the first step in a successful revitalization program.
The Heath brothers are teachers at heart, and Switch features the same high level of research-driven data brought to life through world-class stories as Made to Stick, while also offering loads of practical, how-to advice on how to start and maintain your next change initiative, whether in your business or in your personal life. The ultimate takeaway is that by recognizing that oftentimes it is the situation that must change, not the person, we are able to take action and not fear the unknown.
Mojo: How to Get it, How to Keep it, How to Get It Back If You Lose It by Marshall Goldsmith, Hyperion Books, 224 pages, $26.99, Hardcover, February 2010, ISBN 9781401323271
There are people on this planet who are scary smart, people who look at the world differently and help us see our own lives in a clearer light. Seth Godin is one. Marshall Goldsmith, a highly sought-after speaker and executive coach, is another. Goldsmith has written many books, but What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There from 2007 was a stand-out.
Mojo is Goldsmith’s latest work. While mojo is a ubiquitous word, here Goldsmith defines it as “that positive spirit towards what we are doing now that starts from the inside and radiates to the outside.” The way he refers to mojo reminds me a bit of Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Except “flow” is a strictly internal, “in the zone” state of being, while Goldsmith’s mojo moment is “the moment when we do something that’s purposeful, powerful, and positive and the rest of the world recognizes it.” Like Csikszentmihalyi. Goldsmith believes mojo is something that can be learned and continuously achieved once we have the right tools.
Goldsmith believes that your ability to get your mojo going is impacted by four factors: identity, who you think you are; achievement, what have you done; reputation, what others think of you; and acceptance, knowing what you can change (and letting go of the rest). I found Goldsmith’s approach to identity enlightening because many of the business books we sell focus on ways to change your behavior in order to change your circumstance. Goldsmith asserts that if you don’t first change how you think of yourself, any behavioral changes will feel false and fail to last. And his section on acceptance is a particularly hard, but imperative lesson. How many of us have given up on a friendship due to some small grievance instead of, as Goldsmith encourages, valuing what a friend gives us in total despite their sometimes-inconveniencing quirks?
Goldsmith is an interesting kind of storyteller. He doesn’t tell stories that are highly detailed with visual or emotional descriptions. But, at the same time, with casual language and a singular intuitiveness about people, Goldsmith’s stories about how people lose and gain their mojo keeps you turning pages like the best kind of novel.
Denial: Why Business Leaders Fail to Look Facts in the Face—and What to do About It by Richard S. Tedlow. Portfolio, 272 Pages, $26.95, Hardcover, March 2010, ISBN 9781591843139
Professor Richard Tedlow, author of two of my favorite books, Andy Grove and Giants of Industry, has written a book that tells memorable stories of business leaders who were in denial and whose businesses (think Sears, Coke) were subsequently affected by their inability to see the forest for the trees. This new book, Denial, begins entertainingly with the story of Henry Ford.
In the early 1920s, Henry Ford was crushing his competition: the Model T was a spectacular success. Tedlow tells us that “It took seven years for the company to sell its millionth Model T. Only a year and a half later, it sold its two-millionth. Four million were sold by 1920. The number of units sold doubled by 1923.” At the same time, the automotive industry was changing as the country went from a war economy to greater prosperity. Ford wouldn’t listen when his people warned him about Alfred Sloan, at General Motors, who believed that the consumer wanted something more than a black car. In fact, Ford fired an executive who wrote a memo about GM and called for Ford to change in order to compete. Henry Ford was in complete denial.
There are plenty of business books about the dangers of ignoring your competition—I’m thinking of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma and Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive, both of which warn of disruptive innovation and being able to predict moments of competitive crisis. Tedlow’s Denial looks at why so many companies get it wrong. He also offers common signs to watch out for so your organization avoids this trouble—or at the very least can find a way out of the forest.
The first thing I saw staring back at me from my email this morning came from the author of Fascinate, Sally Hogshead, whose manifesto led yesterday’s ChangeThis issue. Being from Sally, it was a kind and generous message, but there was something there at the end that made my stomach feel a bit more empty than it really was. “Could you fill in my URL on the intro page (I think it’s just blank right now)” she asked. Yes, I had left her bio page up overnight, reading:
Jack has been talking with Michael Levine recently, which has prompted us to take a new look at his book, Broken Windows, Broken Business: How the Smallest Remedies Reap the Biggest Rewards, released by Business Plus in 2006. His idea developed out of a 1982 article in The Atlantic by criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling titled “Broken Windows.” In the article, Wilson and Kelling suggest that the proper enforcement of minor crime lowers not only the overall crime rate, but the rate of major crimes as well. They conclude:
Just as physicians now recognize the importance of fostering health rather than simply treating illness, so the police—and the rest of us—ought to recognize the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without broken windows.
“A broken window can be a sloppy counter, a poorly located sale item, a randomly organized menu, or an employee with a bad attitude. It can be physical, like a faded, flaking paint job, or symbolic, like a policy that requires consumers to pay for customer service.”
Increasingly, it can be digital, such as my coding error that caused Sally Hogshead’s bio to read “Find out more about creating fascinating messages at [birds chirping]“—for more than eight hours. I think that sloppy code on a website can easily be as harmful as a messy aisle at a grocery store or movie theater (I’ve worked at both) and takes a lot more (or at least vastly different) talent to clean up. It was an honest and simple error (I forgot a bracket), but if I would have paid closer attention before moving on to the next thing, I would have done a better job for a hard-working author and saved myself from coming in to unnecessary worry first thing in the morning.
So, pay attention to that code, folks! (Or that shelf display, customer service or returns policy.) Not only will worrying over the details save you greater worry later, but as Michael Levine shows in Broken Windows, Broken Business, it’s the “constant vigilance to the tiny details can make or break a business or a brand.”
